The slow progression to artistic awesomeness.

Category Archives: Simon

So it’s been a little slow around here lately. Until everyone’s ready to do more of the weekly drawings, I thought I’d throw some other work I did up here, fanart for a contest over at Modest Medusa. The author of that comic, Jake Richmond, is the guy who taught 90% of this group 90% of what we know about art, so I think he deserves the plug. Go check it out.

Now that all the brief convention commotion has died down, we can get back to our regular posts. Pretty much every artist does fanart at one point, so let’s have a week of that, eh?

This is Jenassa, my errant traveling companion and talented face-stabber in Skyrim. I actually tried to put a proper background in this one, seeing as I need to try my hand at more landscapes, but I noticed something strange about halfway through: the background and the character did not interact with each other at all, and the character didn’t seem to fit anywhere in the background. My composition clearly needs work. So I separated the two (one of many reasons why Photoshop is awesome) and I suppose they stand reasonably well as individual pieces. Ah, well. So many factors to consider when doing an illustration, but I’m slowly learning.

Something we all need practice with! This was very loosely based off a photo of Mt. Rainier–I used it for a bit of texture and lighting reference but it is by no means pixel for pixel. I learned many things about Photoshop painting this and also came to realize how much I don’t know. It needs another six or seven hours of work before I’ll be fully happy with it, but it’s pretty much presentable right now.

This week’s theme, courtesy of Alex, was to draw a humanoid animal with a costume and occupation that reflected the animal’s personality. That strayed a little too close to the furry line for me, and a man has his limits. ಠ_ಠ Instead, I crapped out and did something closely related. The word therianthropic originally referred to mythical beings that took the form of animals, so this is a rendition of the Celtic war goddess the Morrígan, who was often depicted as a crow and was heavily associated with crows (and may or may not also be Badbh or Macha, other war goddesses who could turn into crows, or they may be three separate entities–Celtic mythology is confusing as hell). She would fly about on battlefields and inspire fear or courage in the combatants, and was always present at the death of a great warrior.

As an aside, read up on the myths of the British Isles; they’re insanely badass.

Ah, the obligatory self-portrait. Every artist should do them, because there’s no face you know better than your own, unless you somehow don’t have access to a mirror. Incidentally, this is the first one I’ve done that is both recognizable as me and doesn’t make me look like a serial killer, so fuck yeah progress!

Whew! Real commissions! While actually getting paid for doing this is nice, it meant I had to take a brief hiatus, leaving poor Alex to pick up the slack. But I’m back now! Yes!

This week’s theme was inspired by reading loads of the SCP Foundation, and listening to loads of the Half-Life 2 soundtrack, both of which are incredibly excellent and frequently creepy as hell. I’m trying a sort of high-contrast minimalistic style, which I’ve been very happy with before but don’t use enough. I should get some black paper and try this with chalk.

This week’s idea was thanks to Blane saying, “Well, I wanted to suggest something to the group with wizards and mechs–OH WAIT YEAH”

Finals this week incidentally required a lot of drawing, so I didn’t have much time to spend on this one, hence the lateness and overall sketchiness of the image. Throwing together robots in Photoshop is always fun though.

So this week’s theme was to draw a piece inspired by this impressively tenacious piece of music. At first my mind was filled with scenes of epic space battles and animesque drama, but when you’re eight minutes into a guitar solo it eventually works its way into every corner of your brain and boots every other thought in the ass. So I drew, simply put, what I imagine the effects of an eight minute guitar solo are on the musician.

Coloring this was fun; I’m finally settling into a method I’m comfortable with.

So, welcome to the blog, and such. Essentially, each week someone will come up with an idea, and the rest of us will draw off of that. The first week was mine: goblin explorer.

I wanted to accomplish two things with this: To avoid simplifying the character and give his outfit and equipment some interesting details, which I feel was a success, and to do an environment I’d never done before, in this case a cave shaft. Stupidly enough on my part, however, I didn’t actually bother to find out what that particular geological formation actually looked like until this was 90% done, so it doesn’t look the best. On the bright side, real-world cave shafts are effing awesome.